Professor, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

AGU embraces the global community and welcomes leaders representing various identities, voices and perspectives. List any identities, voices and perspectives you would bring, including but not limited to nationality, regional representations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and anything else you feel comfortable sharing.

I would bring a broad set of international and domestic leadership experiences with me into this position. I was born and raised within the United States but have spent years traveling within scientific and other circles on six continents, and lived overseas for three years. Through these shared experiences I have been lucky to have interacted and learned from people from all over the world, which has helped me appreciate that leadership requires patience, flexibility and a desire to find the strengths in others even when communication is a barrier. I have tried to bring this perspective into my professional life as a professor, teacher, and research group leader as well as an organizer of international meetings, research projects, and field campaigns with a global set of collaborators. Given the international reach of AGU, these learned skills would be an asset to my role within the Volcanology, Geochemistry, and Petrology (VGP) section.

Volunteer experience that you feel relates to this position:

Organizer of workshops, meetings, and events within the Earthtime geochronology community for the last 20 years; co-founder of the Gordon Research Conference series on Geochronology; chair and member of numerous high-level finance-related committees within Princeton University.

Section presidents and presidents-elect serve as members of the AGU Council and lead their sections. The AGU Council is a diverse forum of perspectives that meets throughout the year to provide input to the AGU Board, staff, and other parts of the organization. Three communities within the Council - committee chairs, section leaders, and students and early career scientists - serve different roles in AGU and bring unique viewpoints to ongoing discussions.

This role aims to catalyze community and build AGU as envisioned by the strategic plan. This leadership position is a dual role: helping to advance AGU’s strategic plan as a member of Council; and leading your section. How would you support the Board, staff and other sections to achieve AGU’s vision, values, mission, and goals? How will you engage with members of your section to execute AGU’s strategic plan?

I had not read AGU's strategic plan before now. Having done so, I can write that I broadly agree with the goals laid out in the document. I think every AGU section has an opportunity and responsibility to find ways to promote discovery and solution based science, enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion within AGU and for outreach through establishing strategic partnerships and communicating our science to the public. I do see some unique expertise within the VGP section that could be leveraged to advance AGU's strategic plan. One is continuing to excel in studying volcanic risks and hazards in the US and beyond. Through conceptual and technological advances in volcanic monitoring and prediction applied to observatories within the US, we have a sophisticated network of scientists developing tools to address volcanic hazards; these advances can be better shared through collaborations with countries with less financial resources, for example in Central and South America. Another opportunity for VGP may be to better include and engage with scientists from the mineral resources community (i.e., ore deposit science, the mining industry, critical minerals research, etc.). I'm not sure how much membership and engagement there is currently from exploration geologists in VGP, but most of ore deposit geology shares a large scientific overlap with igneous and metamorphic petrology so there's potentially an opportunity to contribute more broadly to discovery and solution based science towards the growing need for critical mineral discovery.